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Hanuman ji loved to be with saints who were worshippers of Lord Shri Ram. Hanuman ji always thought of himself as the greatest worshippers of Lord Shri Ram and so he would frequently visit Tulsidas ji’s recitations of Ramayan. Tulsidas ji used to have regular sessions of Ramayan recitations where he would tell parts from the epic and explain the learnings from one of the greatest saga of victory of good over evil.

During one such session, Hanuman ji was listening to the recitation when Tulsidas ji said, “and Hanuman ji entered the Ashok Vatika, looking for Sita Mata. The Ashok Vatika was a beautiful garden with white flowers all around, the lack of colour of the flowers was also because the flowers shared the pain of Sita Mata!”. Hearing this, Hanuman ji got troubled. He knew the flowers didn’t lack colour, they were all glowing fiery red. He politely asked Tulsidas ji if he missed something in the recitation; if in fact the flowers were mentioned to be of red colour instead of white as he mentioned. “Mahatman, please check again to see if flowers were red like the fire in the belly of the sun. I am sure the flowers were not white but red”, he said.

Tulsidas ji got excited and said, “I am sure the flowers were white because there was so much pain in that beautiful garden that even the plants lacked life and colour”. Hearing this, Hanuman ji got slightly angry as he had been to the Ashok Vatika and of course who could know the colour of the flowers better than him, he had seen the flowers with his eyes.

The argument continued, with no one seeming to budge. Hanuman ji revealed himself and mentioned that he was there in the garden and saw the flowers. “Lord Hanuman, you may have been there and you may have seen the flowers in red colour with your own eyes, but the flowers were white”, said Tulsidas ji. There seemed to be no end to it as Hanuman ji couldn’t believe Tulsidas ji were so stubborn that he discounted the eye-witness account of the colour of the flowers! Finally, they decided to head for Baikunth, where they would settle the argument with the only other person who was there at that time, Sita Mata.

As soon as they reached, Hanuman ji flat out asked Sita Mata, “Mata pranam! Tulsidas ji is a great sage and I respect him a lot but I am unable to understand why he is so stubborn. He refuses to believe what I saw with my eyes, the flowers in Ashok Vatika were fiery red, just like the glowing fire in the belly of the sun”. Hearing this, Sita Mata politely said, “Lord Hanuman, Tulsidas ji is correct. The flowers in Ashok Vatika were in fact white and lifeless”. Hanuman ji could never doubt what Sita Mata said and therefore asked her, “Mata, how is it that I remember them as red, I can still picture them in my eyes and they all seem red to me”.

Tulsidas ji was a very learned sage and Sita Mata looked at him, signalling him to answer the question. Tulsidas ji said, “Lord Hanuman, upon seeing the condition of Sita Mata, you became very angry. Blood shot in your eyes and all you could see was red. The flowers were white but because of your anger, they appeared as red to you”. Lord Hanuman understood, accepted and thanked Tulsidas ji for clarifying it!

Anger makes us see things in an absolutely different perspective. We are unable to think coherently and decide correctly. Ziad K. Abdelnour has well said –

Agriculture has been the cause of civilization. People settled around rivers in the form of civilized society once they started farming and growing produce, moving away from a nomadic life. Agriculture teaches us a lot about business. I’ll tell you a small story before coming to the point.
John, a farmer, had a huge patch of land. It’s produce of corn could be in tons. John had a friend, Sam, with a plot of almost the same size. They both decided to begin their careers in farming, making money off agricultural produce.

John decided to grow corn. Sam decided to plant apple trees.
John worked hard in the farm. He knew he had to prepare for the crop every season and that involved a lot of work, preparing the farm, seeding, weeding, fertilizing etc. It was a task to get it done every year but he was happy at the end of the day with the amount of money that he’d get from selling the produce. He was growing richer by the year and started to buy larger chunks of land around.
Sam, on the other hand, had little money always. He had planted his trees in most part of his farm and he also had some crop on the side to allow him a square meal. He was patient and took good care of his trees. He had lots of them, which meant lots of money was also needed to maintain them. He even had to borrow some from John at times, which he promptly returned after selling the harvest.
Years passed. John worked hard in the fields and also had help. He was happy that he created jobs and had provided for families. Sam also had his trees ready for bearing fruit. After eight odd years, Sam had the first fruit from his trees. He took half of the produce to John and gave it to him, for old times sake. He sold the rest and had enough to buy a small field next to his.
That entire year, Sam didn’t have to do much. He took care of his trees and spent quality time with his family in the orchard. John, on the other hand, had to work as hard as earlier, and also managed the large team of employees.
Sam earned a little less than John, but it was enough to provide for his family and to give back to the world. John worked harder and earned a little more than his needs/wants.
In the end, when they died, John’s children still worked in the farm whereas Sam’s children were able to go to the school and got a good education for them because they didn’t have to work in the field all the time.

When building a business, please remember to plant trees and not a seasonal crop unless you are in the transit period from being a crop grower to a tree planter.
Build something to last. Don’t be the last one to continue building.

NREGA, or Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, as called by the UPA government that is fond of adding Gandhi/Nehru/Indira/Rajeev to anything that they can, is the biggest employment guarantee program in the world.
Employment guarantee program per se is something against the spirit of competition and development. It means that regardless of your skill set or qualification, the Government will employ you for a specific number of days every year and pay you minimum wages. This is similar to the corporate bailout programs offered by many governments after the 2008 global crash. A company/individual is not skilled to do something in the right manner but they are supported by the Govt. using the taxpayers’ money instead of weeding them out.
The Government of India is doing the same thing. They have spent 2500 billion rupees, or close to USD 40 billion, without a proper plan. They are paying people for doing things that may or may not be required. Some people even believe that those employed aren’t even doing the job. There is nothing to do and therefore if you are well ‘connected‘ with the block officer, you may even stand a chance to get your salary delivered to your home – the commissions – without doing anything.
Imagine the workforce being wasted doing nothing jobs. These people will never want to develop a skill-set because they are already being paid the minimum wages. They will never move up in the food chain because they will never have tried. The NREGA scheme is turning them into machines that won’t do anything intelligent. They are not creating anything, they have no vocational training, they don’t contribute to the GDP according to their potential. They are being fed the taxpayers money with a spoon so that they can be used as a vote bank.
These people, once they realize that they have passed the age to learn, will have no choice but to vote for the Govt that continues this parasitic scheme paralyzingly the people of the country. Anyone who would dare to stop the scheme would never be voted into power.We will always have an army of unskilled and underemployed people to feed. Millions of them, forever!

I will be honest. I do not need a website and I don’t usually have the time energy and the patience to update a blog. The only reason I have this domain is because years ago, USA.net had begun charging for its service and I didn’t want to give out my hotmail.com free address to people. An email address mapped to my domain appeared slightly more professional!

Now that I had the domain for almost a decade, a lot of people asked me why the website didn’t open. I tried explaining that the email address didn’t have anything to do with the website. Most of these people would then ask me if I had a proper email address like one on yahoo.com or hotmail.com!

So basically the need for a website arose out of the need to convince people that this domain was real and there was a working website so their emails wouldn’t get lost in cyberspace. I have changed the subject of this blog at multiple occasions but as I said, the purpose was more to have an active website than an active dialogue.

This time I am hoping that I won’t have to move the services anywhere and I will have this as an active website with meaningful content for a long period of time. As I mentioned in the last post, I am consolidating all internet properties with one service provider so that the renewal and management is via one single console. That should save me the trouble of reinstalling WordPress every time things renew, making me lose all posts.

I have been trying to look for one provider where I can consolidate all my domains, hosting account and email. While I found Techspeak as one of the reliable solutions for domain registration and hosting, I am yet to move my email to them.

I think hotmail/outlook is still the best hosted email solution provider. Gmail was a nice email solution provider but they have now stopped providing free email hosting to small business.